ES6, ES6 with Annotations, or TypeScript?

[Tim Consolazio]

Time to start this group rolling!

Here's a discussion for you; we all know that Google prefers that developers use TypeScript for Angular 2 development. They used it to write Angular 2 and haven't really done due diligence to documentation or advanced examples in anything other than TS (in fact frequently pointing you away from JS in favor of TS). There is no doubt they want the world of Angular developers to make the switch. 

The reason for this is pretty clear; their engineers, at least the ones I worked with, think like Java programmers. Static typing and OOP is the rule, and they have no use for the loosely typed and terse functional style so many JS developers are inclined to (don't try to use lodash). 

Interestingly, nothing seems to really stick. The last man standing is always plain ol' JS. Closure is generally considered bulky, ponderous and dated (I think there's one book and it's eight years old), the GWT using Java for UI turned out to be similarly undesirable to UI developers (I still have nightmares), the "javascript-based" App Script reminds me conceptually of Microsoft's VBScript (which completely died out), TypeScript is a proprietary MIcrosoft language and is showing signs of departing from the ES6/7 standard...on it goes.

Not to mention, now that we have the really powerful ES6, and ES7 will include annotations and a number of other desirable features such as streams, async functions, annotations...it really begins to get confusing why there is so much effort to replace it. Why not embrace JS as is, instead of repeatedly trying to "fix" it?

What do you think?